Venice: Marie Gillain

Most American readers don’t know Marie Gillain, but the development of her career has been interesting, and yesterday at the Venice Film Festival, she just took a major step.

I interviewed her two years ago — actually she was one of the first people I interviewed for my upcoming book. At the time she was eight months pregnant. The trajectory of her career to that point: Gillain had started out red hot, as a teenager. Through natural ability and even more incredible luck, she was cast out of nowhere opposite Gerard Depardieu in “Mon pere, ce heros” in 1991. It was a big hit, and for the next few years she headlined many movies, playing variations on the same role –- the invincible vixen.

But something happened to her somewhere in her late twenties. She lost something — actually I think she gained something. What she lost was that oblivious quality of youthful imperviousness and confidence. She took on a quality of doubt, disillusion and vulnerability. This, combined with a certain natural decisiveness, made her more interesting than she had ever been. But imagine that, for a time, she seemed –- at least in the eyes of some – to have lost her point as a screen entity.

In the last seven or eight years, she has mainly been in supporting roles in major films or starring roles in so-so films. When I went to France in 2009 and told people there that I was interviewing Gillain, I remember a few said, “Why?” In their minds, it was like somebody traveling across the ocean to the USA to interview, say, Anne Heche. Good, certainly, but do you really need to talk to her?

But I always thought she had something special. She was wonderful, for example, in the ensemble film, “Female Agents,” playing a conflicted woman working undercover for the Allies in World War II. And you might remember her nice work in “Coco Before Chanel” as Coco’s impulsive, sensitive sister.

Well, after yesterday, no journalist or film writer who goes to France to write about Marie Gillain will ever be confronted with the W-word (why) or for that matter the P-word (pourquoi). She stars, opposite Vincent Lindon, in the new Philippe Lioret film, “Toutes nos envies” (“All Our Desires”) as a successful young judge (and wife and mother), who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor (like 10 minutes into the movie). Over the course of the film, she deals with this grim illness while pursuing her work, as an advocate for poor people in debt to usurious credit companies.

Generally, I’m not one for illness epics. But something about the alchemy of this character –- the strength of her advocacy and the fragility of her health –- is so ideally suited to Gillain’s natural qualities and abilities that, to see her here, is like seeing someone break into the next level. Like seeing something familiar suddenly and completely realized.